I made a good start on my short-fiction-binge. I wrote 3,200 words of a new story tonight, set in the world of the comic book from Rangergirl. I'd planned to call it "Bluebeard's Gold," but that title doesn't really work (the story has taken on a different emphasis), so I'll have to come up with something else. Maybe "Helldorado." Or "Buffalo Nickels." Or "Counterfeiting Coup." Hmm. I like that last one.

Titles are hard. But, fortunately, the story itself is going incredibly well. The weird idea I came up with while lying in bed last night has proven rather viable. I'm actually strip-mining some of the best stuff out of an old idea for a novel that I know I'll never get around to writing. Lots of rich images, characters, mythology, and historical stuff I already did some research on, years ago. It's going to be one of those weird-rich-tapestry deals, though I don't expect to come anywhere near the information-density of, say, a Waldrop piece, or one of Andy Duncan's historical pieces. Fortunately, this story takes place explicitly in an imaginary, bizarrely-alternate, magic-riddled version of the Old West, so I can take a lot of liberties.

I wonder if I'm the first person to write a story featuring both Aaron Burr and Gilles de Rais? (They weren't exactly contemporaries, but in The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, odd things can happen.)

I could see writing several stories in the world of this comic, actually -- ideally, I'd be able to write such stories as a comic, but that's a project I'm not ready to take on, I'm afraid. I don't know how to think in terms of sequential art, though someday I'd like to spend some time figuring it out.

In other writerly news, I got a 2-week rejection from Alchemy on a short piece. Too bad, though I think I want to put the story in this year's holiday chapbook, so I doubt I'll send it anywhere else.

Otherwise, today was a typical, inoffensive Monday. Heather and I ordered yummy-scrumptious Chinese food, and I read a bit, and we snuggled and watched some TV. She baked cookies, and I tried to restrain myself from eating them all as soon as they came out of the oven. And so on.

The only bad news is that our cat Marzipan does have a skin disease of some kind. Probably fungal, though we're not sure -- the vet left a message saying her culture came back positive, and we'd have to get some medicine for her, some to be applied topically and some to be ingested. Sigh. We'll find out specifics tomorrow. It seems like we just got finished dosing Zanzibar with medicine three times a day, and now it's Marzi's turn. Ah, well. They'll get all healed-up eventually, I hope.